It’s rare for a debut film in the Official Competition at Cannes to cause such a stir and generate such high expectations as the superbly titled All We Imagine As Light, one of the favourite contenders for this year’s Palme d’Or. The second film by young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia is indeed one of the few highlights of an otherwise weak edition, especially as it offers an extremely tender and humanistic perspective on a story that deals with the hardships women face in their daily lives in a year that has seen no shortage of extremely violent, cynical to the point of abjection representations (see, for example, The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, or Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard).

Winning the award for Best Documentary (l’Œil d’Or) at the 2021 edition of the festival with A Night of Knowing Nothing, presented in the Quinzaine des Cineastes, now Kapadia makes the great leap into the Official Competition with her first feature-length fiction film – which partially revisits the main theme of her previous film (that of a forbidden love due to caste differences, a story with strong feminist and political overtones) and introduces it into a broader narrative about relationships that, for various reasons, are impossible. In the hands of other directors, the film’s script could very easily have slipped into excessive drama, cheap melodrama, or even miserabilism, but the filmmaker employs not only her experience with atypical narrative forms (after all, A Night… is a found footage essay ) but also a clearly cinephilic approach – the imprint of a Yasujirō Ozu or an Akira Kurosawa is evident here – to create a story that breathes and often has the nostalgic tinges of a daydream.

Which is clear right from the opening scene, where a Mumbai market is captured at closing time in a wide tracking shot, accompanied by the off-screen voices of several workers who have come from remote villages in India to make a living, telling their life stories with a mix of joviality and melancholy: a delicate way to introduce some of the film’s main themes (internal economic migration, economic hardship, class differences) and to announce that we are about to step into the universe of the everyday, the small destinies carving their own paths amidst the larger breezes and whirlwinds of history.

Namely, that of nurse Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who lives her daily life in a bittersweet loop, waiting for a sign from her husband who has gone to work in Germany. In parallel, we follow Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger co-worker and flatmate, who spends her days secretly sending messages that wail with longing to her boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and her nights together with him on clandestine dates, knowing all too well that their parents will not accept their relationship. Complementing this emotional landscape, elderly caretaker Parvati (Chhaya Kadam) finds her life in freefall after her husband’s death – as the modest apartment he left behind is slated to be demolished to make way for a luxury apartment tower (“Without papers, you could vanish into thin air,” she says, in a moment of resignation). The intersection of their destinies becomes not only an opportunity to explore various facets of femininity and the hardships they face throughout their lives but also to leave behind the hustle and bustle of Mumbai on a journey where they will find some form of liberation.

The fine embroidery of this narrative lies not only in the film’s moments of female solidarity – see the scene where the nurse gives a young patient, who has just given birth for the third time, a blister pack of contraceptive pills, along with advice on how to convince her husband to accept a vasectomy – but especially in its small moments that shine with the intensity of fireflies. For this is also a film of night lights, of the small everyday poetry that sneaks into inconsequential moments of life: the image of some girls listening to music on the same pair of headphones in the subway, a pregnant cat that suddenly appears in the protagonists’ lives, or the heartbreaking moment when Prabha lets her somewhat strict mask fall aside as she bitterly embraces a food processor her husband sends her from abroad. (There’s no shortage of humour either: see the montage of photos of suitors sent by Anu’s parents, which the young woman mocks with her boyfriend, imagining the lives of the men behind the images.)

From this perspective, perhaps the only thing I could fault this little gem of a film for is its need to “resolve” its threads, offering an ending that feels like a narrative shortcut – when in fact the freedom of movement in the urban phase of the story is its most impressive facet, the ease with which it dances between these moments of bliss and sorrow in the protagonists’ lives, almost imitating the rhythm of the piano music that accompanies much of its journey. But even despite a slightly forced resolution, All We Imagine As Light is indeed a delight – and I have a feeling the closing gala on Saturday will confirm that.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.